Riding Uncle Sam’s coattails on missile defence

In this undated photo released by the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) and distributed Tuesday, May 21, 2013 by the Korea News Service (KNS) in Tokyo, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, center, visits the Breeding Station No. 621 of the Korean People’s Army under construction at an undisclosed location of North Korea. (AP Photo/KCNA via KNS)

The deployment of two mid-range Musudan missiles on the east coast of North Korea, with an estimated range of 2500-4000 kilometres, was not the most disturbing threat issued by Kim Jong-un during his latest skirmish with South Korea. A far more serious threat to global security was the launch in December 2012 of the Unha-3 rocket — a three-stage, intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) with an estimated range of 10,000 kilometres.

When combined with North Korea’s latest underground nuclear test in January, these moves represent a concerted effort by the regime to develop and deploy an offensive nuclear capability.

Of course, without a nuclear device small enough to deploy on the Unha-3, North Korea does not have the capability today to launch a direct nuclear attack against North America — nor does the regime have any rational motivation to do so. However, the inevitable acquisition of this capability at some point is entirely relevant to policy options facing decision-makers in the U.S. and Canada right now. When acquired, a nuclear-tipped ICBM will give Pyongyang a credible deterrent that will seriously diminish our coercive leverage in subsequent military security crises involving North and South Korea.

After decades of multilateral and bilateral disarmament negotiations with North Korea, one key lesson is irrefutable: Nothing has altered the regime’s nuclear ambitions. Clearly, the strategic imperatives, global political capital and regional security guarantees that come with a nuclear capability far outweigh any offers the international community is prepared to put on the table to change North Korea’s agenda.

Observers remind us that China is North Korea’s primary trading partner and the only real hope Kim Jong-un has to keep his military leaders happy and prevent the country from becoming even more impoverished. But China’s leverage is not absolute. If China actually had the kind of influence needed to effectively manage its ally, it almost certainly would have prevented the December launch of the Unha-3 missile and the January nuclear tests.

The most perplexing aspect of Canada’s policy is our ongoing refusal to engage in bilateral discussions with our most important NATO ally on ballistic missile defence architecture to protect Canadian territory and populations.

Why? Because China’s failure to stop these actions provided Washington with the perfect justification to speed up scheduled deployment of ballistic missile defence (BMD) assets to Guam, South Korea and Japan. Moreover, if North Korea actually launches a Musudan missile on a trajectory that even approaches a U.S. ally or military base, the Pentagon would be handed the perfect opportunity to obtain crucial intelligence from an operational test of U.S. BMD. None of this is consistent with China’s regional and global security interests — yet Beijing had no ability to control events, or manage the pace and direction of escalation.

North Korea’s leaders are becoming increasingly dependent on a strategy that relies almost exclusively on exploiting a kind of fabricated irrationality and unpredictability — on fear, in other words. It’s a very risky strategy because it assumes the U.S. and China will cave at some point — if only to avoid a messier crisis, regime collapse, or war.

But North Korea could be repeating the mistakes of other autocrats who underestimated international resolve; think of Slobodan Milosevic in 1999 and Saddam Hussein in 1998 and the lead-up to the 2003 Iraq War. Leaders of authoritarian regimes are not in the best position to receive balanced intelligence from unbiased advisers regarding appropriate strategies to carefully manage tensions, or avoid the misperceptions that lead to mistakes and wars.

NATO allies have rightly concluded that the deployment of BMD technology is an essential component of the global strategy to address emerging threats from North Korea. In November 2010, 28 NATO members signed NATO’s new Strategic Concept, a document outlining the obligations of alliance members in relation to their “collective” security and defence. The most relevant part of the alliance’s new strategy is the commitment by all NATO members to “develop the capability to defend our populations and territories against ballistic missile attack as a core element of our collective defence.”

By virtue of our membership in NATO, Canada now officially endorses the logic, strategic utility and security benefits of ballistic missile defence — but, apparently, only when it comes to protecting European and American territory and populations. The most perplexing aspect of Canada’s policy is our ongoing refusal to engage in bilateral discussions with our most important NATO ally on ballistic missile defence architecture to protect Canadian territory and populations.

No need to worry. The Pentagon is conducting environmental impact studies (by the National Research Council) on deploying new BMD ground-based interceptors on the U.S. East Coast (Watertown, N.Y. and northern Maine), within hours of Ottawa and the New Brunswick border. According to U.S. Secretary of Defence Chuck Hagel, the latest plans for ground-based interceptor sites are designed “to protect the eastern United States and Canada against any potential threats that are limited in nature.”

Prime Minister Stephen Harper knows that the U.S. government will continue to cover the costs of BMD deployments to protect Canadian citizens — while American taxpayers foot the bill. Canadian officials have the luxury of sitting back and letting our allies protect our territory — but it’s a foreign policy strategy that takes freeloading to a new and somewhat disturbing level.

Frank P. Harvey is a Senior Fellow of the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute and holds the Eric Dennis Chair of Government and Political Science at Dalhousie University. His most recent book, Explaining the Iraq War: Counterfactual Theory, Logic and Evidence (Cambridge University Press), won the 2013 Canadian Political Science Association Book Prize for the best book on international relations.

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